Documenting Family History Artefacts

I recently completed a sad but interesting and rewarding assignment. Sad, as it was what was left of a couple’s life and interesting and rewarding as I worked through the items to piece together these people’s lives and achievements.

I had documents including a 14,000-word Dissertation that was scanned, (OCR) Optically Character Recognised and saved as a PDF. Personal items (Medals and Badges) were recorded on camera and photographs were scanned. As luck would have it, many were identified on the rear of the photographs and so the double-sided scanner came in very useful providing an ‘A’ and ‘B’ image allowing researchers to see where and when the photographs were taken and quite importantly who was in it.

A Life in Words and Pictures

There were other items including the Wedding Album, invitations, order or service and table menu, various awards dinners and running orders, newspaper articles, family correspondence and funeral service cards. Even prompting cards for a speech.

As I worked through the various documents it became apparent just what lovely people they were, how they mattered to their family and community and also the very deep bond between the couple at the centre of the assignment. There were some lovely shots of them together and it was a privilege to work on this box of artefacts and document it so that future generations might be able to see who their relatives were, where they lived, what they got up to and it felt to me, after 2 days work in documenting it all, that I’d almost grown to know this couple.

Parts of the collection are being offered to interested parties including the Scouting movement and a Museum and the rest will remain in the hands of the family archivist. All the scans and documents are being made available to the wider family.

This was a different type of job as I was scanning everything from newspapers, menu cards, orders of service, invitations as well as my more familiar photographs. Many photos were in albums (which requires a different sort of scanning style) and the artefacts were photographed and where possible scanned as well. The Dissertation needed to be scanned page by page which took a lot of time but was worthwhile as it captured an interesting document for future generations.

Many family historians want to make their work available to a wider audience and scanning records and items of interest achieves this. An interesting project to work on and one which I hope will help them and future generations to learn about real people’s lives.

Our work isn’t just about scanning batches of photographs, in cases like this it is about documenting people’s lives and hopefully, by doing this, they and their wider contributions to their community and those around them will not be forgotten.

When did this journey begin?

The start of the journey

As an old colleague of mine recounted being pulled over at the side of the road by the Police for a traffic census some years ago (you don’t see the census points these days). The Officer asked “Where did this journey begin?” my colleague answered, “West Ham Maternity Hosptial!” apparently the Policeman did not have a great sense of humour!

Someone asked me how we got started on this journey ending up in the scanning business? Considering I was originally an Electrical Engineer, it’s a strange journey. I was in at the very beginning of the computer age and feel lucky that I grew up with technology from the earliest days when the computers I worked on were programmable controllers. As I started on that part of my career I met a lady who was researching the family name and I got involved in genealogical research way back in the day before there were any personal computers, the internet was 10 – 15 years away then and we used to go to records offices to undertake family history. The nearest thing we had to a scanner was a photocopier. The paperwork involved filled a substantial chest and the card records were a major undertaking until I was able to transfer most of it to a database.

Perhaps 15 years ago I was beginning to use scanners to digitise family documents and photographs but found that the scanners were small and anything above A4 was difficult to work on. I purchased a larger scanner and was able to offer my services to digitise family history documents to start with. As time moved on, the need to document more things such as photographs and photo albums started to gain importance. The business grew up from humble beginnings scanning family history documents to the business as it is today. It is worrying how quickly photographs fade and how fragile they are and scanning them makes sense to protect them from further degradation and in the worse case complete destruction. We had to scan a number of pictures that had been left in a shoe box and some mice had got in. The damage was major and many pictures were totally destroyed, gnawed into tiny fragments. We rescued the remainder and saved them from further damage.

About 5 years ago we made a major investment in production computers, a website, scanners, printers and audio, video and cine transfer equipment so that we could have a professional setup and to retire some of the equipment that had passed their “sell by” date. Growing out of a family history background where over 40 years had been spent identifying circa 3,900 members of the wider family and documenting them back to the 16th Century provided for the experience to run the genealogy side of the business which is a small percentage of the day to day work. We’ve been involved in some really interesting work including War Diary research. The majority of our work is scanning and cine and video transfer. We get some audio work and this year had the great delight in transferring an audio history where the narrator had been involved in WW2 and escaped to the UK.

This is a most enjoyable business to be in as by its very nature you are helping to preserve things for people. Old tapes (both audio and visual), cine films, photographs, negatives, photo albums and all manner of memorabilia – we scan artworks, certificates, handwritten documents and many other things apart from photographic items. It is lovely to see the reaction when old photographs are enhanced and repaired.

I generally enjoy reading articles in Familytree magazine but this one actually made me do a double take. You see it suggests that Google PhotoScan is a “Game Changer”. Now call me old fashioned but “A Game Changer” should be something that changes the game or it is better by far than what we have today. The trouble is, that the App and the technology and everything else Google PhotoScan offers is fine if you want to snap up a few photos, correct them (for light bounce etc) and store them in the cloud but hold on, since when did a lens on a phone come anywhere near to the granularity of a high-end scanner? NEVER that’s when.

So, I’m being scathing here and whilst they say it’s cheaper than using pricey scanners well, there’s a very good reason for that too. You only have to consider that the scanners I use can scan at resolutions up to 12,000 dots per inch to start to realise that there is a huge difference that a tiny camera lens, which could also be dirty, would have no chance of achieving anything like the resolution you would need to accurately pick up the image and lift it clearly off without blurring and having colour problems. My Scanners are accurately calibrated regularly to ensure that the image scanned is as accurate as it can possibly be.

Perhaps a useful article to read about why you should always defer to having photographs scanned properly is here. In this blog by Alison Taylor, Alison makes some key points about why you should not use the App as follows:

WHY YOU SHOULD NOT USE PHOTOSCAN TO DIGITIZE AND ARCHIVE YOUR OLD PHOTOS

Very low image quality makes these “scans” useless for anything other than a quick social media post.

High compression means you’ll see weird color shifts and blocky artifacts if you ever want to enlarge or print this photo.

Distortion of your photo. The app uses your phone’s flash to take the picture, and then combines further multiple shots to remove the glare that is created by the flash. When it stitches all these pictures back together, your dad’s head may not be the same shape it used to be. Just sayin’.

Over-sharpening and contrast obliterates fine detail. This amount of sharpening and contrast actually makes the photo easier to see if it’s zooming by on a tiny phone screen. But if you are capturing this photo to save forever, share, print, or view on a large screen, the file will be damaged beyond repair. For instance, if you are capturing a photo with a lot of people in it and their heads are pretty small, it’s a good bet that you may not be able to recognize these people when zooming in on the PhotoScan result.

It takes 4x longer to capture an image using PhotoScan than it does with your phone’s camera app.

Alison has also shown various scans to back up her assertions and certainly, it makes for a graphic explanation of the huge differences between scanning and photographing old photos. You can see the whole article on “GOOGLE’S PHOTOSCAN APP IS A NIGHTMARE FOR YOUR OLD PHOTOS. HERE’S WHY.” here.

I keep a number of links to articles about digitising photographs, why you should do it and how to store your images once they have been scanned (possibly enhanced) and saved.

Old Photographs

This article from the Telegraph breaks down the process into a number of key steps:

Sort through your photographs properly

Digitise your archive

Organise your digital collection

Preserve the originals

Share your pictures with others.

The point being that with physical pictures fading and gaining a colour cast or just physically deteriorating, now is the time to review and sort these out. The article is a timely explanation of why you should seriously consider checking your photographs and why digitising them is currently the best way to preserve them for current and future generations to enjoy.

Of course, our competitors are mentioned in here, I’d be very surprised if we got a mention from the Telegraph after all! However, the main thing is to be comfortable with who is digitising your photographs for you. We are still small enough to oversee every scan and to take the appropriate level of care when handling your precious memories.

What is particularly important, once the collection is digitised is what to do with the originals and the digital copies. Sharing amongst the family is a good way of ensuring that the images will be available to many people and in the event of some sort of disaster occurring to one digital copy others will be around to be replaced but there are other ways of off-site storage explained in the article too which will interest anyone wanting to digitise their photographs.

I was asked the other day what is the strangest thing to have happened or what’s the strangest or most unusual thing you’ve seen when working on scanning or transferring?

Well, quite a lot happens when you are working from strange coincidences to identifying with the subject matter (say a family Christmas on a cine film) or just what you discover as you proceed with the work.

There have been so many that I thought I would document these occasionally and the first one is probably one of the most unusual.

What are the chances of receiving a Cine film for transfer and as you are editing the final film, prior to placing on chapters and burning it to DVD, than to notice that the scene is of the Orpington Carnival, obviously in the 1970s from the fashion and the camera is pointed towards the old Tesco supermarket where I used to work part-time when I was at school! Better than that I suddenly recognised that the Rotaract (Junior Rotary) Carnival Float was coming into view. Then I saw a teenage me, with my girlfriend sitting on the lorry waving to the crowd. What are the chances of that I wonder?

The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.